Minnesota Voices

Minnesota Voices is a TC Daily Planet feature that highlights individuals from many different places in our community. They are not just the usual voices who are quoted in news stories and appear on editorial pages (though those people may appear from time to time), but artists, business owners, community organizers, teachers, and more.

Minnesota Voices stories are, above all, interesting and personal. These stories are NOT dry, formulaic, or the same old, same old message that a lobbyist or advocate has given sixteen times already. Minnesota Voices focuses on who people are and what they do in the world, and on what motivates their lives. For information about writing a Minnesota Voices article, click here. 

MN VOICES | Angelique Kedem becomes the director in one of the nation's first Promise Neighborhoods

By Kristoffer Tigue, TC Daily Planet

Growing in up in apartheid South Africa and witnessing her country's first democratic election shaped the philosophy and character of Angelique Kedem, the new director of St.

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MN VOICES | Louis Alemayehu on environment and culture

By Andrea Parrott, TC Daily Planet

Photo by B Fresh Photography and Media, used courtesy of Intermedia Arts

Culture, environment, and poetry are all words that describe Louis Alemayehu, who is of African, Native American, and European ancestry.

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MN VOICES | Kathy Mouacheupao

By Sheila Regan, TC Daily Planet

After Kathy Mouacheupao resigned from her position as Executive Director at the Center for Hmong Arts and Talent (CHAT), where she started working as a teach

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MN VOICES | Dr. Anton Treuer: Author, educator, linguist

By Mary Jane LaVigne, TC Daily Planet

Dr. Anton Treuer (Photo courtesy of St. Paul Foundation)

Anton Treuer had paid the repair bill and was headed to the lot to pick up his car when the mechanic called after him, “Miigwech!” For Dr.

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MN VOICES | Velma Korbel: "Not everything is Minnesota nice."

By Andrea Parrott, TC Daily Planet

Velma Korbel, Facing Race Ambassador award winner and director of Minneapolis civil rights department

Dishwater and burgers. These are the intermingling smells that remind Velma Korbel of segregation.

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MN VOICES | Amy Rice, making art in the heart of Northeast Minneapolis

By Sarah Rattanavong-Wash, TC Daily Planet

Amy Rice. Photos by Sarah Rattanavong-Wash.

At Art-a-Whirl, one studio you can’t miss is the one belonging to Amy Rice. She’s a Minneapolis-based artist whose star is just beginning to rise on the national scene. Her work has been shown in a diverse array of settings at home and abroad, from Palmer’s Bar on the West Bank to the Carmichael Gallery in London. Critics have praised her style—which makes use of spray paint stenciling and pastel palettes to create a fragile world of women and children in natural settings—calling it a mix of “cute” and “quirk” and comparing her work to that of another artist she’s exhibited with—Banksy.

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MN VOICES | Jo Ann Clark helps students of color get to college

By Andrea Parrott, TC Daily Planet

Jo Ann Clark with twin grandchildren

Andrea Parrott

Jo Ann Clark loves kids and she loves education. "I'd rather invest money in education than jail," Clark said in a February interview with TC Daily Planet. She pointed to education as a major factor in helping kids obtain better jobs as adults. Growing up in Memphis, Tennessee, Clark credits her grandfather and grandmother with instilling in her the importance of getting a good education. When asked why she listened to them, she simply replied that obeying them was the natural thing to do.

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MN VOICES | John Whitehead: Folk documentarian

By Alexander Holston, TC Daily Planet

From small town Minnesotan poets and potters to the African-American reclamation of the banjo in the Carolinas, St.

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MN VOICES | Muralist on a mission

By David Jarnstrom, TC Daily Planet

It never gets old for muralist Jimmy Longoria—watching harried Minneapolitans freeze in their tracks to bask in the radiance of what used to be just another drab city wall.

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MN VOICES | Jim Northrup writes on the Rez Road

By Stephanie Fox, TC Daily Planet

For more than 21 years, Jim Northrup has been one of the premier literary voices of the American Indian and the Midwest writers' communities. He is a playwright, a fiction writer, a newspaper columnist and teacher, but he calls himself a bullshitter ­- another name, he says, for a storyteller.

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